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How Motherboards Are Made
mikemuch writes "Reporter Mark Hachman recently took a tour of a motherboard manufacturing facility operated by Gigabyte in Taiwan, and has posted a complete slideshow of the process. He was surprised by how much still had to be done by hand, but the company is still able to produce 1.5 million motherboards a month."
1. not sure why you think it's sad, unless you're heartless bastard who would love to fire thousands of workers
2. low value has nothing to do with the fact that it's cheaper to use humans instead of robot, if robots can make a better product, faster, cheaper then human counterparts, they'll use robots. regardless if the end product is cheaper or not.
I'm fairly certain it will be a daughterboard.
Also there was much more detail on the ATE and soak testing.
> I can think of heaps of peole, myself included, who would have loved a trip like this, and could have made a detailed write up
/. weren't confused by the minutia of my job due to a poorly-written-up slideshow.
> that made sense, and did justice to the hard work and conditions those people work in.
So true. If I was forced by circumstance to work for pennies a day dully repeating the same task over and over again like a soulless automaton, breathing in noxious vapours and having nothing to look forward to in my working life but countless hours of soldering, I know that my biggest concern would be making sure that nerds on
Wrong. It is currently cheaper in the short to medium term to continue to use humans instead of investing in research to create a machine to do the job.
A better example than motherboards is clothing. Take T-shirts for example. The textiles industry was historically the first to become industrialized, yet here we are 250+ years later, and there are still people in sweatshops making the simplest items of clothing. Why? Because it's technically too difficult to automate clothing manufacture? Whatever.
The reality is that no motherboard, clothing, or any other company is willing to actually spend money and innovate. Find ways of making basic items by the millions, quickly, reliably, cheaply. And the reason they're not willing to do it is because they can still find cheaper and cheaper sources of labour. On China, they're current strategy when wages on the east coast get too expensive, is just to move 100km inland, rinse and repeat.
There is lack of innovation in the manufacturing sector. It's caused an oversupply of cheap labour. Simply put, there is no pressure on factory owners to continue the industrial revolution, and human progress. Instead there's an incentive to use quasi, and what the hell, full blown slave labour.
I harp on China, but it's happening all over. It's happening a lot closer to home than you think. Our society is back-peddling, and it's down to the fact that rabid (no so)free market capitalism has become the dominant ethos of our politics and media, where it is assumed that no matter what the issue problem or injustice is, the omnipresent "market" will find a solution to all our ills.
I'm not some fanatical anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism protester. I just think that too much power, not money, power, is being concentrated into the hands of private companies. I don't like big government either, but I still think that corporations should be reigned in. If we don't, your children or grandchildren could find themselves like those Chinese brickworkers, force to work at the barrel of a privately owned gun.
P.S.
I believe in a free and fair market. Why should workers here have to compete against countries with lower standards?
May the Maths Be with you!
But most of the assembly IS automated, that's what the pick-and-place machines are for, and the reflow ovens.
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It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
The assembly line for the Macintosh IIci was more automated than this one. Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down. Seiko and Sony developed some beautiful technologies for making small consumer electronics items untouched by human hands.
Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
In light of the current expose of child labor?
You make it sound as though you found yourself at a breakfast table, croissant in one hand, Le Monde in another, with a stunned expression on your face having just learned that all the cheap clothing and shoes and furniture and electronics that we in the first-world just LOVE were manufactured by a bevy of tiny little hands in sweatshops.
I'm sorry, but wasn't that entirely obvious? Hasn't this issue been on the tip of our humanitarian tongues for at least twenty years? And when you went on to say "One has to wonder what conditions exist in factories where people don't get guided tours" all I could think is "NO! One does NOT have to wonder" because one should already KNOW.
These conditions are deplorable.
But the GP said that it's "sad" that human labor like this is cheaper than machinery. Well, perhaps, but I disagree slightly. Until we put all those people to work, until we bring them into the global economy, their situations will never improve. Only after we hire these people will we begin to see upward pressure on wages. Only after this generation--and perhaps the next--work painstaking hours to produce our shiny toys will you begin to see what more closely resembles a living wage in these countries.
My then-girlfriend did her Graduate thesis in Ecomonics on this 2 years ago and her research led her to believe that in 25 years you'll see the average Chinese worker making $2/hr in 2005 dollars. That would be a stunning change in the world economy, in terms of both cost-of-production and consumer markets.
>> Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down.
>> Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
First, it's not a bad thing to provide employment for people. You might recall the auto unions terrified that robots would replace workers. So using people to assemble things is not a bad thing.
It's actually pretty difficult to make an automated machine that can assemble parts. Some of the ones we have cost nearly $1 million. At that price, we can only afford to use them where the product doesn't change, and/or there are serious hazards to having a human do the job.
Since motherboards change a lot, using automated equipment would add delays, increase capital expense, and require a highly skilled team to keep them running. If you put 20 robots in a continuous line, a failure of one shuts down the line. If you only get 3 failures per year per robot, your line is down 60 times per year. You can retrain humans quickly, and they adapt quickly to design changes. Humans are a good thing...
You'll see a lot of humans in a Toyota plant. They were never automated, just well run and well managed.
Place nail here >+
This is not physically strenuous work. It won't cause poisoning or RSI or heat stroke. There's no high likelihood of disease or injury. The main downside is that it doesn't pay well.
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Reality is racist. Deal with it.
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The market being based on price has little to do with it. It is simply not feasible to use highly integrated automation with products with lifecycles of 6-12 months max. Setting up the automatized process is costly and needs well trained workers, and any revision requieres it to be done again. Plus it is not easily adaptable to changing demand, whereas with manual labor you just shift your workers.
> I go through this same argument with a friend of mine on a regular
> basis, only that one's about Wal-Mart in India. First, it costs a
> lot less to live there than it does here.
Sorry - wrong.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "Third World" should not expect the same standard of living as people in the "First World"
> Second, unemployment is huge, so if every worker in the factory
> died of a heart attack Friday night, the factory could easily be
> fully staffed by Monday.
That is not a valid argument for an international corporation paying a subsistence wage to someone in China/India so that people in the First World can buy sweatshopped cheap merchandise.
Those corporations should be required to pay the same wages in US$$ as they should be paying in Europe or the USA.
Excuse me sir? How can you actually make that kind of number up? 1% of the cost of one motherboard a week?
You may want to do some research before you look down on other races, sir.
1% of 1 mother board per week is 1% x $100 / week, which is $1/week, which is 4 dollars US per month.
I truly believe that it doesn't take one to find that the minimum wage of a Taiwanese is $487.
While I don't want to be offensive, it is your kind of bigotry that show the ignorance of humanity. Perhaps next time you will do some research before trolling.
And to the moderator who modded him insightful- Sir, you can't possibly believe what he claimed, right? (Apparently not...)
Lets see if I can shed some light on this process. First off I'm an ex process Eng. that worked in a contract SMT manufacturing facility here in the US before every thing moved offshore. Actually started at Compaq the Motorola then did a stint with a little contract house then moved on to one of the big contractors. So what all this means is I know what I'm talking about.
.01 sec's).
1) The above poster is correct in that the first pic we have is a Screen printer. It's function is to apply solder paste to the PCB. The machine next to it in the same pic is a laser and vision solder inspection station. It's job is to make sure the screen print is good. It checks both the hight, registration and coverage of the past. Approximately 90% of all defects in a good SMT manufacturing process are cause at this point due to clogged solder stencils so in high volume shops you put a solder past inspection system in place to catch those errors while it is very easy to recover from them. You just wash the PCB and run it again plus clean the stencil before you have to many bad boards.
2) The next machine he takes a picture of is a Pick and Place machine which means he missed one. The actual next step after solder inspection is the chipshooter and as the name implies its job is to place the passive components on the board. When I left the business about 5 years ago the current state of the art was able to place about 10 components per second. This machine is basically a big gattling(sp) gun type of design. In that the placement heads rotate around a turret and the board moves (That is why you can only place small devices with it). After the chips are placed we normally also placed the smaller IC's with the chipshooter as well. You just have to slow it down to do that part or the IC's will slide off the board as it moves (it moves very fast normally about 12 inches per second and from dead stop to full velocity in under
3) Now comes the pick and place machine that he did take a picture of. It's purpose is to place the larger components on the board. In this machine the placement head moves not the board. All components are both vision tested(leg bend left right test) and laser (for leg flatness or bend up down tested) before the component is placed on the board. Depending on the part and the number of heads on the machine the pick and place can place parts on the board at about the 4 per second range. Larger parts take longer mostly due to there size and or weight. Basically if you move the head to fast the part will fall off or become missaligned.
4) The next machine he takes a pic of he got right it what it does. It visually checks to make sure all of the parts are on the board. It will also check alignment and if the part has some distinctive feature it will make sure it is the right part as well.
5) The next picture is the reflow oven. It is basically a big convection oven the better ones are forced air ovens. The problem with his description is that he states that it heats the board up to 200c which is not correct it gets a little hotter than that. How hot you have to heat the board and components depends on the solder past and the components you are using. Now that most SMT manufacturing has moved to lead free paste it is mostlikly getting closer to 250c.
6) Visual inspection. Yes this is still done by humans. There are many issues with doing this by machine at this point that are not easy to solve. You can machine check components but we already did that before we put the board in the oven so why do that again. What the girls are looking at are the solder joints mostly. If the oven has lost a zone or the air flow is not right for some reason then the solder joints will change in color and how it looks. Again this is a very hard problem to solve with a machine because it is hard to see fillets and hills (the solder wick up the side of a component) with a camera no matter how high of a resolution you have because to see it you have to have light and the light will cause brigh